


All These Choices We Have Made

by Chill_with_Penguins



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Character Death, Even I don't know what this is, Every chapter will have its own warnings okay?, Fluff and Crack, PSTD, So much angst, What Have I Done, seriously, spoilers for the whole show
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-28 10:10:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16239491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chill_with_Penguins/pseuds/Chill_with_Penguins
Summary: Everyone has a story (or a thousand)~OR~A series of poorly-written Teen Wolf drabbles with no correlation to each other





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Okay, so this is something I wrote before I had technically seen season 6A, please forgive me for the slight cannon divergence. I was just really really curious about the idea of everyone forgetting about someone + what if that person also forgot? and then this happened. Warnings for disease diagnosis, amnesia-related things (is there an official warning term for that?) and general Stiles Angst.

Stiles bit his lip, a little bit of hysterical laughter threatening to bubble up, because of course, _of course_ this would happen.

_Just tell me your name, son._ The words echoed in his head, bouncing from frantic thought to frantic thought, like Lydia's screams in Eichen House, and okay, this was _really_ not what he needed to be thinking about right now. He took a deep breath. It would be okay, everything would be okay.

He just... He had to find Scott. Or Deaton. Or someone. Someone would remember him, surely--he just had to _find_ them and he could go from there.

Except, no one did. He went to Scott and Deaton and Lydia and Liam, to Isaac and to the grumpy librarian who had kicked him out last week, hell, even to Harris. No one remembered him. No one knew who he was, and by the end, no one could see him either. He found himself hunched over, sitting in a park and walking himself through some breathing exercises with little success. The panic was still setting in, hot and bright and constricting, making his thoughts scrambled and messy.

His fingers crunched tightly around a piece of paper in his hand, and he stared at his own name, printed neatly and surrounded information no one would bother to see or remember. He looked at his birthday, his weight, his medical history, his treatments.

God, he'd been an idiot. The weight of everything wrong sunk into him, dragged him under thick, clotting waves of desperation that made is whole body hurt with tension.

_No reason to worry them,_ he remembered thinking. _It's probably fine. It's probably nothing._

_It's probably nothing,_ he had chanted, all the way through the summer and up until the doctor was pressing results into his hand, face grim. He had wasted so much time waiting for the next wave of supernatural crazy to crash over them, and now--

His throat felt too thick and heavy all of a sudden. Was that a thing? Was he dying from sudden allergies? He couldn't remember being allergic to trees or grass or anything, but then, he also couldn't remember the exact shape of his father's smile or the shade of Scott's True Alpha eyes so who knew?

Some fleeting, distracted part of his mind thought about the ripples a pebble makes when it falls into the water, about Ghost Riders and metaphysics and how it had scared him--real, true, cold fear he hadn't felt since before the Nogitsune--to think about vanishing without so mush as a ripple, about being there and then gone and no one even noticing.

It was a different kind of fear from their usual painful, people-are-getting-mauled-to-death terror.

He thought it might be worse.

"My name is Stiles Stilinski. I'm 17, turning 18 soon, and I drive a blue Jeep. My father is the Sheriff. My mother is dead. My best friend is a werewolf." He chanted facts for a long while, long enough for the fingers to go numb and his vision to blur while he stared at the paper, long enough for the words _frontotemporal dementia_ to look like nonsense.

The sun set, and he kept sitting, wondering how the hell he was supposed to fix this when his pack weren't the only ones forgetting everything.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bobby Finstock being Bobby Finstock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just pure crack I wrote to entertain myself, no warnings necessary :) It's very short tho
> 
> Just out of curiosity, does anyone else really just want a show about him?

As all of his players could attest, Coach Finstock was an eclectic character. He gave odd speeches, lessons that had nothing to do with economics, and his reactions to good or bad games varied equally, so long as it was never the appropriate response. 

He only got worse after the werewolves. 

"Why can't you turn the whole team? It'd give us an edge in the finals this season."

"Does your super-strength mean you also have super-accuracy?"

"Will you pretend to be my dog on the full moons so you can still come to the games?"

"What do you mean, you don't actually turn into a wolf? What the hell kind of screwed up werewolf are you?"

"How good are your super-senses?"

"Good, good, so can you tell me what kind of cologne Greenberg is wearing? I really don't want to ask him."

"How many people have you killed? Have you eaten any of them?"

"Do you have to wash your fur?"

"What about animals? How many raw Bambis have you eaten?"

"Are there any other werewolves on the team?"

"Do you guys really hate vampires? Because I have this nephew--"

"I swear, the next time you miss a game because you're 'saving the world', I'll demote you from captain and put Lahey in your place!"

"Do you at least have a tail?"

It was a long, long lacrosse season. It got even worse after he took an arrow "protecting the pack". 


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek Hale has eyebrows & feels

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is there a warning for "Derek Hale lost his entire family in a fire and then turned into a grumpy werewolf"? Because there really should be.
> 
> Ummmm okay focusing. Trigger warnings for loss, grief, loneliness, etc. Happy/ambiguous ending though, so hopefully not too bad.

Pack nights were definitely the best. 

Admittedly, there wasn't much to compare them too--Derek's life was pretty much a montage of training and fighting for his life, with occasional artistic shots of an empty, too-big apartment. But still. 

The weekly pack nights were the only reason he was still sane, if he was being honest. Which he was--or at least, honesty was one of the things he was working on. The point was that when Derek had become an Alpha, he had still been that scared husk of a boy with the stink of ashes haunting him. He had never wanted to come back to Beacon Hills in the first place, and then--and then Peter wasn't comatose and Laura was dead and Derek was left standing with cleared murder charges and an empty grave (they didn't bother to bury either half of the body) and eyes that glowed like fire (he could never seem to escape flames; they followed him everywhere). He had been scared and lost and hurting, operating on nothing but instinct and empathy, when he had started turning Beacon Hill's most traumatized teenagers. 

It was dumb. He knew now, looking back, that it had been the worst kind of mistake--the kind that had ended in a dead family and an empty forest and long howls of grief so many years before--but he couldn't bring himself to regret it, not when the long, bloody road had led him here, to standing in a kitchen that smelled like Pack and listening to the gentle, teasing murmurs of conversation float over from the living room. Nights like this, he could feel the familiar ache building inside him, the full feeling of _pack-family-tribe-yes_ as his wolf practically vibrates under his skin. 

It's not the full moon, but it's close enough. Maybe he should go for a run. 

If he was alone (he is always alone, the gaping hole where other should be screams out at him except on nights like this), he'd go without a second thought. Hell, months ago he would've gone despite everyone gathered in the next room over. But that was before an Alpha Pack and a darach ripped his world to pieces, before a boy with amber eyes (Deaton called him a spark because of course he is, of course Derek has fallen in love with another human who could set fire to all he holds dear) had screamed at him that _you are an Alpha now you cannot worry about yourself when you have other people who need you, do you understand, do you_ \--it was before he learned that love was not always a weakness. 

So. He _could_ go for a run. He feels the itch to move under his skin, to get _out_ of his skin, but the pull of the Pack is stronger, so instead he migrates to the next room and stands watch, something deep and powerful and right vibrating in his chest as he listened to the shrieks of outrage as someone (Erica?) kicked ass at Mario Kart. For a brief second, Stiles glances over from the tangled mass of limbs. His eyes meet Derek's--for some reason, the human was the only one who noticed the Alpha rejoining them--and Derek feels a little bit like a kid playing with matches. For the first time in a long time (damn that crooked smile) he thinks he might not be scared of the fire that's blossoming.

He doesn't go on a run. 


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I never thought I'd say this but
> 
> The Nogitsune needs a hug

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey again  
> It's me  
> Back with my weakness for making the villains into actual characters and not just stereotypes 
> 
> Anyways the point is   
> Don't read this is if you don't like dark things/angst/unhappy endings/generally creepy and vaguely psychopathic things  
> Yep I think that's about it
> 
> (It's written from the Nogitsune's perspective, what would you expect?)

It's cold and lonely and dark, and the wind _howls_ as it rips through the spirit, screams as it tears past him in its rush to get away. 

He doesn't blame it. 

There is pain. There is nothing but pain, a bright, piercing agony so hot that it almost burns through the cold that envelopes him, but not quite. His thoughts are scattered--his mind long since torn to shreds--but they all circle around the cold, constant burn of shrieking nerves and strands of shadow that bind themselves to his skin. 

This is what it is to be the Nogitsune: you are cold and you are hurting and the thing that hurts worst of all is the memory of a time when your world wasn't frigid and painful. 

Perhaps that's why he chooses the boy. There are three of them, after all, but the wolf is too full of bright, warm contentment--he doesn't have everything but he has a mother and the girl and the beginnings of a Pack. The girl has the wolf and her father, and a mental barrier that has been strengthened by the worst kind of guilt and heartbreak, which is intriguing but not appealing. 

The boy, though. He stinks of hunger and heartbreak and desperation, and one glance into his mind shows such pain--the empty ache of a hospital room, the solid thud of a casket lowered into the ground, the flash of dark eyes and wrinkled skin and the sudden bursts of ­ _pain-fear-panic_ that trail after him.... Yes, the boy is a worthy candidate. His mind is sharp, honed by fear and grief and betrayal, and where the other have roots to tie them to the community, he has only the fraying strings of a dying family. 

He will not fracture when he is possessed. There is nothing left to fracture. 

The demon-fox makes his move, siphoning himself slowly, so slowly, into the boy; he looses time trying to fit himself into the boy's life. He makes a game of it--without the game there is no amusement to be found--and does his best to cover his own never-ending pain with the boy's. 

For a time, he locks himself away in the boy's mind. The two sit together on an ancient stump, a playing board between them and nothing but white emptiness all around them. 

He can almost forget his agony. He can almost warm himself with the screams of the boy's friends, with the terror that slowly rots through the boy, eating away until there is nothing left but an empty shell of the person there was before the Nogitsune came. 

Others come to stop him, but no one can. True, they manage to lock him away--he's been alive long enough to know there is no escaping those runes they painted on the boy's flesh--but he's also been alive long enough to know the value of patience. One day, they will need his power. Until then, he can wait, burying his agony and hiding his memories of _warm-love-happiness._

(Every demon was an angel once.)


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lydia is the badass-iest badass to ever make those heels work and we should all worship her

There are few certainties in life. Lydia knows this--she knows it the way a girl, argued over like a toy and left forgotten in the corner, always will. She knows what the certainties are, too: Newtonian principles, chemical constants, universal laws of matter and energy. She knows these things, these cold, hard facts, and she clings to them with the force of a woman being torn to shreds. 

(Maybe she is. It is Beacon Hills, after all.)

Sometimes, when she's stressed or tired or falling to pieces because none it makes any sense, she makes lists. Slow and methodical, dragging the pen across the page, remembering things that are always true:

1\. An object in motion will stay in motion, unless acted upon by an equal or opposite force. 

2\. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. 

3\. Gases expand to fill the shape of their container.

4\. Light is emitted while electrons shift through energy levels. 

5\. There is no such thing as the supernatural. Everything has an explanation, if you look hard enough. 

6\. Dead is dead. 

And then. Sophomore year rolls around, framed by shouts and an empty house and the throb of a base line being dropped, filling her ears and rattling through the empty space that should be heartbreak. Sophomore year happens, and she has to start crossing things off her list, because McCall is suddenly the best player and Jackson is pulling away and Stiles (scrawny, nerdy Stiles, who's followed her everywhere since third grade) is showing up bruised and bloody. Sophomore year happens and she gets high on prescription pills to wish away everything she's seen and weeks pass and she's at the dance, ruling from her rightful (metaphorical) throne and then, in a blink of the eye, she's bleeding out on the field and there's no one there to hold her safe anymore. 

Everything changes, after that. It's one thing to lose constants. It's another to become the anomaly. 

And she doesn't _want_ to be. She just wants... safe. Normal. Happy. She wants all the things she dreamed of having, all the things she'll never get back. She wakes up muddy and shivering in the woods and wonders how she got there, her throat raw from screaming in this blood-drenched town. 

Banshee, she learns later. The Wailing Woman, who prophesies death, who screams between the worlds and feels ghosts all around her. 

(Dead is dead. That used to be a constant. It's still true, sometimes--dead is dead, dead like Allison and Erica and Boyd and her favorite movie clerk and Mr. Harris. Dead is never coming back. Dead is gone forever.)

(Except sometimes it's _not_ , sometimes it's a narrow miss or a cold, sputtering heart or a psychopath who crawls into her head and shoves her aside like another broken toy as soon as he's crawling out of the dirt, fingernails ripping away.)

(Dead is dead except when they need it to be and she would scream with all the unfairness but it wouldn't make a difference. She'll scream anyway and nothing will fucking change.)

Later, after so many years and nights and bodies, after she's stopped counting days and lost track of the nightmares, she'll be stronger.

She'll get out of this god-forsaken town with a population of murder and a bulletin board of missing faces. She'll travel the world, saving lives and earning awards and solving impossible puzzles. She'll learn how to channel her screams, how to see death before it strikes and parry. She'll sit in a cafe and drink espresso and see all the scars from when she almost died (a man tried to rip her apart, once; he drilled a hole in her head and for the first time she wished she could scream her own death) and remember that she didn't. 

Later, after a lifetime has passed, she'll find a rip in reality and step through into a Fae court. She'll remember, for the first time in decades, how it felt to rule, to walk through halls and have people part before you like the sea. She'll become a queen. 

She'll start a new list of constants, then. A new set of rules and patterns to hold dear, to carve into her lungs and flow through her veins. 

1\. I am the strongest thing I know.


	6. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles and Lydia are hurting, but they're hurting together so it could be worse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uhhhhh again general darkness? Stiles is pretty depressed/anxious/generally messed up after the Nogitsune + the rest of the plot of Teen Wolf. Lydia is Lydia. Happy(ish) ending

The cold bothers him, but it's not until weeks afterwards that he starts noticing how much it hurts. There wasn't time, before--hardly a breath between the Nogitsune and the funeral, then with professional assassins and Theo and Dread Doctors and Donovan (he'll never forget the look on his face when he fell, tumbling down and landing and the _blood_ \--)

So. Anyways. It's not until weeks later, when things have settled again, that the full weight of it all hits him. Crushes him, really. Because--because--

He _killed_ people.

It hurt, an unbearable agony, when Allison had died, but he'd never really processed the memory. Never given himself long enough to realize it was his fault. And god, the hospital, the feel of a sword sliding into Scott--his hands were coated in blood, were dripping with it, warm and salty and congealing under his fingertips. 

And maybe, maybe if that'd been it--if he could blame it all on the Nogitsune--he would've been... Well, not okay. (He doesn't think he'll ever be okay again, after all this.) But he thinks maybe he could forgive himself. 

But there's Donovan. There's someone dead, blood dripping on the library, running through his nightmares. There's a bite on his shoulder, healing too slowly. There's a dead body all of his own. 

(Killed in self-defense is still _killed_.)

This isn't the first time Stiles' thoughts have suffocated him like this, dragging him down, down, down, to a dark place. Usually, he'd go to Scott, but ~~he burned that bridge on a rainy night not so long ago~~ he just can't. Not right now. Not with this. 

Instead, he retreats. He buries himself in research, in runes, in anything that will help to keep them safe from the threat that was sure to pop up sometime soon, and any day now, really--

(He's not protecting them from himself. He's not.)

(He doesn't wake up screaming, doesn't still dream about the copper taste of blood, doesn't catch himself carving the oni mark everywhere he goes.)

It's Lydia who notices, weirdly. Or maybe not weirdly--she's always been scary-smart, the kind of person Stiles can imagine taking over the world on a rainy weekend. He feels those calculating eyes on his back, day in, day out, and wonders what she sees. 

The summer before senior year, with too much quiet and not enough new monsters to blot out the ones lurking in his head, she pulls him aside, asks him if he's okay. 

He means to say yes, that he's fine, that everything's fine, but all that comes out is a strangled laugh. 

(Later, he'll ask her what gave him away, and she'll reply with their fingers laced together that he hadn't asked her first.)

The two of them... Well, not slip away, exactly, because despite the quiet on the creepy front, they all have lives to live and they're a pack which means they're never alone. But they find more and more moments where it's just the two of them, watching muted credits and sharing tired smiles over the pack's snores. She goes after his flannel and he gets revenge through her make-up and together they re-learn how to laugh, to smile, to live. 

It hurts, of course it does, but it's a good kind of pain. The kind that comes with growing. The kind that comes with letting go. 

It's on one of those days, with a storm still too far off to sneak over the horizon and the summer heat thrumming around them, that he looks down and realizes his fingers have wound themselves around Lydia's. He's not sure what they are--best friends or lovers or maybe just _people_ , but he wants this. He wants it so much it overwhelms him for a second. 

His thumb grazes her knuckle, and she glances over, a question glinting in those green eyes. He just smiles back and they walk forward like that--hand-in-hand, surrounded by pack-warm-family-strength. 

He thinks that, like this, he might be a little invincible. 

He thinks he might come out of all this okay after all.


End file.
